Is America about to break apart?

Here’s a fun fact: almost half of Americans believe that there will be a civil war in their lifetimes. Less fun fact: they could be right. To observe the United States today is to watch a country that cannot get on with itself. Some people say that it has always been like this – that there was never any chance of a country as wide and big as America being able to agree on things. These people then point to the genius of the federalist system, and the way in which different states could have different arrangements within the union.

But as you may have heard, there have been occasions in America’s history when states were forced to do things they didn’t want to do. Two centuries ago a civil war was fought over the issue. And in the last century the issue of state law vs federal law has had a number of combustible flashpoints.

In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled (in Griswold vs Connecticut) that contraceptives should be available to married people throughout the United States. In 1967 (Loving v. Virginia) the Supreme Court swept away those remaining state laws banning interracial marriage. In 2003 the court ruled (Lawrence v. Texas) that remaining so-called ‘sodomy laws’ were unconstitutional. In 2015 (in Obergefell v. Hodges) it ruled that the right to marriage applied to gay Americans. And, most famously, in 1973 (Roe v. Wade) the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protected a woman’s right to have an abortion.

Two lines of opposition have emerged to this. The first is those in American jurisprudence who believe that in cases such as Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court overreached itself and it had no right to make abortion a federal issue.